Transcript: Dinaw Mengestu Dinaw Mengestu: So much of it is, it’s about finding ways of becoming seen. You know, there’s this way in which so many of the characters feel invisible and are, both sort of publicly and also in their private lives, that they have no way of sort of getting beyond these sort of, again, walls they are forced to hide behind for multiple reasons. Jo Reed: That is Dinaw Mengestu, talking about his novel, All Our Names. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I'm Josephine Reed. In many ways, Dinaw Mengestu has taken exile as a subject. His first novel, which is the Big Read selection, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, tells of an Ethiopian immigrant shopkeeper in a rapidly gentrifying DC neighborhood. In How To Read Air, Mengestu looks at the dislocation through the eyes of the second generation struggling to understand their immigrant parents. His third novel, All Our Names, complicates this subject further. All Our Names moves back and forth between the American Midwest and Uganda in the late 1960s, early 70s. The American chapters are narrated by a white social worker named Helen; while a man we know as Isaac narrates the Ugandan sections. We learn many things about Isaac: that he has come to the United States on a student visa, that he wants to write, that he and Helen have become lovers, and most crucially, that Isaac is a borrowed name. He left the original Isaac, his great friend, a charismatic political organizer, behind in Uganda where he is caught in the maze of revolution. While the experiences of Mengestu’s characters reveal different facets of hope, idealism, war, and love, the focus always returns to what it means to be connected to a place and to be known for oneself, and conversely the disconnection associated with exile and living on the margins of life. And as Mengestu illustrates, each has its price. When I spoke with Dinaw Mengestu, I asked him to tell me what inspired All Our Names: Dinaw Mengestu:  The novel began while I was living in Paris and I had almost finished my second novel How to Read the Air, and I had this idea that there’s a moment in time in Africa’s history, in the post-colonial moments that was full of optimism. And really quickly, I had these series of voices of young college students or aspiring college students on a campus somewhere in Africa who were rebranding themselves, renaming themselves out of a sense of profound hope and optimism of what would happen next in their countries. And the novel started there. I thought I would write from a place that I haven’t really written from before, which is deeply invested inside of one place in Africa. And also at a particular time that is often forgotten or ignored which is that great moment of hope and joy that surrounded the continent after the end of colonialism. Jo Reed:  Well, it’s interesting because you alternate chapters between the United States and Uganda. And indeed, it was a time of enormous optimism in the United States too, with the Civil Rights Movement and suddenly there were all of the possibilities that were there. So these two things were happening in parallel with each other. Dinaw Mengestu: And, you know, I wanted to begin in that moment of optimism but then quickly I pushed the timeframe a little bit further back. So it was actually the moment of optimism was the genesis and then it became actually what happens when that optimism is on the rapid decline. So actually, it became a few years later when we were looking at the early 1970s both in Uganda and also in the United States where we did have that sort of great, perhaps great only in retrospect but this sort of release that happened with the Civil Rights Movement where we saw enormous progress being made on the legislative side. And at the same time there’s a lot of frustration that happened post 1968 where, I think, there’s a realization that for all of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement there is still profound economic disparity, still deeply entrenched racism inside of the United States. And in Africa, you have this moment where a lot of these men who had become, who had been liberators, who had been sort of great populist figures moved towards tyranny and autocracy. And suddenly that hope and optimism began to winnow away. Jo Reed:  You have, as we said, alternate voices. We have an African man, who’s narrating every other chapter, and then we have an American woman in the Midwest where, in fact, you were raised. Dinaw Mengestu:  Yeah. Jo Reed:  You were raised in the Midwest. So I would imagine that is a place you know very well. Dinaw Mengestu:  Very much so. I’m as much a product of Africa as I am of the Midwest. I grew up first in Peoria, Illinois after my family left Ethiopia. And then in the suburbs of Chicago which may sound like I grew up in a large city, but in fact, the suburbs felt very much like they were part of a small town world as well. And so it was almost inevitable that the novel began with the desire to write about Africa, but really quickly needed to take on that second half of my history of my personality, which is the side that’s deeply rooted in this sort of the small rural towns of the Midwest. Jo Reed:  Well, why don’t we talk about the two, well there are three main characters. Let’s just take them one by one. Tell us a little bit more about Helen. She’s a social worker in a very, very small town in the Midwest. Dinaw Mengestu:  Yes. It’s a rural college town, and I’ve always thought of her as a very early feminist type figure. She introduces herself with this idea that she has a very strong voice. And that often times that voice needs to be muted because people maybe be slightly uncomfortable with it. And she decides to sort of forgo the traditional route of what a young woman in the Midwest at that time would do. She doesn’t have a family. She doesn’t have a husband or children. Instead, she tries to have a career as a social worker out of both a naïve and very optimistic sense that there’s one way of making the world a slightly better place. Here’s one way of addressing the needs of a community, which is to become a social worker. And so she begins her life by, she begins her adult life by doing that, by setting herself slightly apart from the norms of her society and her community. And at the same time, she’s deeply rooted and invested in this place. But I also think of her as being slightly estranged. She’s not an immigrant, of course, but she’s someone who is slightly on the margins of this culture and this society. She knows that she’s both at home and also not at home here. Jo Reed:  And then, Isaac. Isaac in Africa. Dinaw Mengestu:  Yeah, that’s always the hard part. Jo Reed:  Yeah. I think about it as the African Isaac, the American Isaac. Does that work? Dinaw Mengestu:  Yeah. There’s so many different ways of trying to frame them. Jo Reed:  Well, the Isaac who we know only in Africa is a charismatic, dynamic personality who is very much involved in the politics of Uganda. Tell us a little bit more about this. He was a fascinating character. Dinaw Mengestu:  Yeah. He comes from a small town in Uganda and moves to the capital out of this, again, fairly optimistic and also at times slightly naïve desire to want to make something of himself, to want to become a part of his country’s future. And quickly he realizes that he’ll never become a college student. He’s too poor, too uneducated to actually attain that space. But he does have this sort of charisma and this way of engaging not only his friends but the sort of larger community. Really quickly, he takes on, he finds a way of making that name for himself. He finds a way of creating a space for himself, first on the college campus, and then later on as the novel progresses, in this sort of revolutionary movement. And while he’s a problematic character because he commits acts of violence that are unforgivable but at the same time there’s always, or at least I’ve always imagined him as a character whose initial desire was always, born out of a very honest and genuine and humane instinct which is like how can I become a part of this place? How can I actually engage both my culture and my politics to make something better? And those dreams and desires are dashed and denied, there’s a move towards violence for him. Jo Reed:  And the bridge between African Isaac and Helen is American Isaac. And we hear about Isaac the revolutionary through the eyes of Isaac who ends up coming to America. He is sort of the detached reporter in some ways. Dinaw Mengestu:  Yeah, he is. He leaves his family in Ethiopia in order to go to Kampala because he has these literary aspirations. He wants to become a writer. He doesn’t necessarily know what that means but he knows that this is one way for him to create an identity for himself that’s radically different from the history that he’s been born into. So he wants to make, again, like his friend Isaac he wants to make something of himself that’s both different and better than the people before him have been able to imagine. And so he has this strange place where he is both engaged in and at the same time stands on the margins, you know. He goes there because he wants to witness not so much acts and for much of the novel that’s what he’s doing. He’s playing the role of witness. And when he is forced to act you can see all of the ways in which he’s unable to do so completely. He doesn’t have his space or proper place both inside of Uganda and then later on in the United States. So he’s a character who occupies that strange middle ground, as you said, both between Africa and the United States where he ends up leapfrogging between these two spaces. And at the same time is able to pay attention to them, I think, in ways that the other characters aren’t able to. Jo Reed:  There are three couples that are happening in the midst of this. There’s… Dinaw Mengestu:  Yeah. And thank you for noting there are three. Often times people notice that there are only two and have doubts about the third, but there are three. Jo Reed:  Yeah. So there’s Helen and Isaac who comes to America. Dinaw Mengestu:  Yeah. Jo Reed:  And then there’s Isaac and Isaac. And then there’s Isaac and Joseph. And these friendships are very, very complicated. There’s a great deal of dependency that goes back and forth with them. And a sense where one person in each of those relationships wants to save the other and will go to great, great lengths to do so. I mean, sacrificing themselves. The one I found the most interesting was Isaac and Isaac. I just love friendship. So let’s do that one last. Isaac and Helen; that was an interesting one. She fell in love with him very, very quickly. Dinaw Mengestu:  Yeah. Even before she falls in love with him sort of what happens their relationship begins very quickly in one way, and yet in other ways, you know, she’s supposed to be his social worker. So before they actually have any real intimacy they perform these gestures and rituals of a couple. She guides him through the small town and she takes him to the grocery store. They go shopping together. She helps him learn how to cook. So they haven’t become a couple yet but they’ve gone through all of the gestures of what a normal couple will do. And so when they do finally begin a relationship it’s so almost inevitable and casual to the both of them that it has a sort of a veneer of simplicity. They pass each other in the hallway and kiss because at that point they feel like they have almost earned that right or that it’s almost an inevitable part of what they’ve been doing. As their relationship progresses, of course, they have to contend with all of the strings of anxiety and violence that would sort of come upon an interracial couple in this small town in the United States in the early 1970s. And so they have to find some ways of actually creating something real, something that’s born out of more depth and more complexity than just the rituals of a relationship.  And they have to find a way to take that relationship that’s very private, that exists behind closed doors and needs a public expression, you know. It’s hard to love someone in the shadows. You know, you eventually want that love to find its way outward into the public sphere. And so, their trajectory is one of moving from that sort of private place of a couple learning to find ways of knowing each other and falling in love with each other, to a couple that can then face the world publicly even though that world may reject and deny them. Jo Reed:  Yeah, there’s a scene, and it’s very interesting the way it’s placed in the book, where Helen and Isaac go to a diner. And we can talk about that more specifically in a moment, but that’s immediately followed by another café scene in Uganda which is another pivotal scene in which Isaac the revolutionary is asserting his right to be in that café and that mirror was really very interesting to me. Dinaw Mengestu:  Yeah. All of the relationships have echoes, you know, that happen fortunately fairly organically without my sort of authorial intrusion or imposition on them. They begin to have a fairly direct conversation with one another. So, Isaac and Helen go to a diner and they’re treated very poorly because people are uncomfortable watching a black man and a white woman sit down together. And they know that there’s something intimate happening between them and that act of intimacy, that small gesture of her holding his hand is really sort of what triggers this reaction from the people inside the diner that’s like, you should not actually be here. Jo Reed:  Then we have in the Café Flamingo. Isaac the revolutionary being very revolutionary and deciding he was going to be served and insisting upon it even though it meant he got, Dinaw Mengestu:  Yeah, being attacked. Jo Reed:  Yeah, being attacked. Dinaw Mengestu:  And in some ways he mirrors Helen. Like he knows, he goes there deliberately to be provocative. He wants to assert his space, his right to be a part of this wealthy community of college students on the campus. And once that is undermined or mocked by these other students who are affluent, who are wealthy, who are real college students his reaction, of course, is not to run. He stands up and knows that he will lose this battle, but he still take them on because people will then recognize him even more. He will become a story once he does that, that he will bear the scars of this act. And he’ll take on a certain fame and that’s sort of what he’s going for as well. Jo Reed:  Identity is so important in this book. I mean from the title, All of our Names and Isaac the revolutionary is always about making, you know, “We can make a name for ourselves. No, why should we stop now?  People are just beginning to know who we are.” Dinaw Mengestu:  Exactly. Jo Reed:  And it really is between those two Isaacs and that relationship that I just found just so beautiful the sense of being able to be recognized by somebody at that age when, you know, you have all of this passion about trying to figure out who you are. And there’s this person who you sense, without having to talk about it, just knows, gets you on such a profound level. And then you just add the romance of political possibilities to that and whoo. Dinaw Mengestu:  Yeah, so much of it is, it’s about finding ways of becoming seen. You know, there’s this way in which so many of the characters feel invisible and are both sort of publicly, and also in their private lives, that they have no way of sort of getting beyond, again, these walls that they’re forced to hide behind for multiple reasons. And so at times the characters are just striving to make someone else next to them see who they are. You know, there’s not only Helen and Isaac, but Helen’s boss David. You know, he follows Helen around town to see her possibly have this interracial relationship because he himself is gay and is unable to have any public relationship or maybe even private relationship. So he wants to see her having this transgressive relationship because that becomes a way of saying for himself like maybe such a thing is possible, maybe it’s okay to sort of move beyond the norms of society and have these types of love that I’m capable of. Jo Reed:  Mm-hm. And the most transgressive relationship probably is between Isaac and Joseph, which is so transgressive it’s unsaid, and even hinted at causes a very violent reaction.  And it probably is also the most complicated relationship, I think, out of, well, no, Isaac and Isaac is. But it is. It has its own set of complications. Talk about that. Dinaw Mengestu:  Yeah. Isaac the revolutionary, you know, he aspires to find his place in this world and he does so partly through this man Joseph who becomes the leader of this burgeoning revolutionary movement. And initially, it’s hard to know that they’re in love with each other, but quietly the narrator begins to realize that part of what draws his friend to this movement, to this revolution, is the fact that he’s in a relationship with this man Joseph. And, as you said, it’s a relationship that has no words, that has no language, that can only be expressed through these sort of strange quiet gestures. So the narrator watches his friend Isaac leave their bedroom in the middle of the night and he understands for the first time where he’s going and that he’s going to go to Joseph’s bedroom. And from there, when there’s a small moment that the narrator might even publically or quietly suggest out loud that he knows what their relationship is based on, that automatically creates this sort of violent reaction from his friend. He feels, I think, both betrayed and, at the same time, very much at risk because a relationship like that would be so transgressive it would be completely impermissible. No one would even contemplate it happening. Jo Reed:  And then complicating things even further is Joseph leading this movement which, whatever intentions it might have had originally, resulted in many people being murdered. Isaac, whom he loves, being one of the people who is doing the murdering. And we always want to think about people who do those things as totally other. No relation to anything that has anything to do with humanity when the reality is they’re so much closer to us than we really care to acknowledge. Dinaw Mengestu:  Yeah, without a doubt. Joseph’s initial desire isn’t to kill or to create violence; it’s to react against this sort of corrupt and autocratic political regime. And when you have no form of political expression, you know, when you can’t protest, when you can’t vote, you know, violence becomes its own means of expression. And Joseph ends up falling into that. You know, the way to remove someone from power is not through the ballot box but through the weapon and through the bush so people will retreat from the capital. They retreat from the public space and they go into these sort of spaces of outside on the sort of margins of society where violence ends up taking the role of any form of public discourse. And once the violence begins to move, it creates its own momentum and tension and creates the space where this whole society feels quite precarious. You know, so Joseph’s army commits large acts of violence, but then you also have these villages, these populations that feel like their lives are under enormous threat. Their very precarious existence is constantly under duress by anything new coming into it, and so they commit acts of violence not because they’re violent human beings but because they worry about protecting themselves and the people that they love. And so anything new that intrudes upon that scares them and they react violently. Jo Reed:  And, on one hand Joseph, well, I don't know, create seems to be overstating it, but certainly enables Isaac to find that killer within him. And at the same time goes to great, great lengths to save him. Dinaw Mengestu:  Yeah. And the killer within him is one of those things where you feel like it’s one of saying like you have to, not toughen up, but you have to be able to sort of face this harshness right. This is what’s happening now in this society and this is the only way that we’ll be able to sort of move forward. The only way we’ll be able to rid ourselves of this government is to be strong enough to commit acts of violence. It’s not that acts of violence are committed for no logical reason. There is a logic and there’s a seeming sense of necessity. That may not be true, of course, but I think part of what happens is that idea becomes instilled in Isaac to some degree where he has to try to find a way of accepting that violence is a form of expression. That violence is a means to a very pragmatic political end. And, you know, at the same time you do see Joseph go through these great gestures of trying to find ways of saving someone that he loves. So, you know that capacity, that compassion is still very much within him, and the only way of probably expressing that was to find the that he cares about the most, or the person he cares about the most, and that’s this young man. Jo Reed: And this young man is a very self-aware young man. And there’s a point in the book that Joseph had built this house, and Isaac, the revolutionary is showing Isaac the journalist, the house. And Isaac the revolutionary, is saying, he had asked Joseph, “What kind of revolutionary has a woman scrub his floors?” And this is Isaac speaking, “He laughed at me. He said, that’s why people become revolutionary’s. So they can have somebody else clean their floors. What could I say to that? I was living in his house by then. For the first time in my life, every day, when I woke up I had clean clothes and something to eat two, three times a day, as much as I wanted. Once I had that, I realized my revolution was over.” How true that is. Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah, you know, I think, Joseph says, I’ll help he says, “You know we go through this so we can have people clean our houses.” Jo Reed: Yeah, clearly. Dinaw Mengestu: But definitely the idea that part of what we’re fighting for is just these basic things. Jo Reed: Right. Feed me. Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah, when the two friends are in this house waiting for the leaders of this revolution to arrive, the thing that they end up toasting to the most is that they may never go hungry again. And that’s sort of really what pushes them towards this movement, that they have been hungry, they’ve been starved, not just, sort of, physically but, sort of, emotionally. That their desire to want to be able to more with themselves, to create meaningful lives, and a future, and to be able to imagine a future. Not being able to do so is its own form of, sort of, starvation. You feel like your life is hemmed in and is almost over before it has a chance to actually materialize. Jo Reed: And Isaac also saves his friend Isaac. Dinaw Mengestu: Very much, yeah. Jo Reed: I mean, in a way that was so profoundly moving and utterly believable. Because, in the final analysis, I mean, Isaac, revolutionary Isaac and Helen really do mirror each other in the way, in a number of ways, not the least of which they are so rooted to their place. Isaac cannot imagine himself, he said, “I won’t exist outside of Uganda.” And the same way Helen, though she certainly doesn’t want to become her mother, she’s still, she had never even been to Chicago. I mean, she’s so rooted to that little town. Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah, very much so. And had they both have this, you know, Helen has this, sort of, profound anxiety of, like, who is she, and what happens to her if she has to leave this space. And Isaac knows that all the things that he cares about and loves about, the things that have brought him to this difficult place in his life, are also still attached to the fact that he loves this country, this space that he’s grown up in and he would rather die than leave it. Jo Reed: Are the characters in this book based on people you’ve met during your travels to Africa reporting? Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah, very loosely. And really Joseph the most, who’s a strange composite of both very fictional man that I’ve invented, but there’s a colonel in eastern Congo that I spent time with while doing a story on the conflict there. Who was both, sort of, very charismatic, and at the same time clearly had a streak of violence underneath him, and did believe deeply that the military actions that his army was going through was the way of saving the country. That these were necessary acts of violence that were being committed in order to make sure the country gained some form of stability. And I think he genuinely believed that and to some degree he was right, you know. There’s a way in which you can’t be completely passive, and at the same time that seductiveness; I was easily seduced by what he was saying because I wanted to believe that. I wanted to believe that these desires, his intent, and the acts that were behind them were all committed in the name of a greater good. And maybe they were, but that doesn’t mean the greater good actually was achieved through them. Jo Reed: When you begin a book like All Our Names, do you know where you’re going when you start? Dinaw Mengestu: No. I have no idea. I thought the novel would, like, take place with a group of friends in Kampala over the course of, and that would be the whole book, and then Helen came, and then Isaac came, and then another Isaac came. So I’ve, yeah, it’s always been the joy of writing for me. Is the, sort of, process of figuring out what happens. Jo Reed:  How was it writing as a woman? Dinaw Mengestu:  Surprisingly easy, and, I guess, I never thought of it as writing about a woman. I always thought of it that there is Helen, who is the narrator. She came into the story and it wasn’t until I was maybe more than half way done with the novel that I realized I was really writing from the point of view of a white woman in the Midwest because I never had that initial anxiety. I never felt like the voice was forced or that I was struggling to figure out if I was doing it justice. Helen introduced herself and, right away, I felt like I knew her. And I never thought that I’m writing from a point of view that is radically different from mine. I thought that I’m writing about a character who I knew intimately and whose voice and whose history I’ve somehow been able to imagine as well as I could imagine the voice and history of a young man in Africa. Jo Reed:  Why this title, All Our Names? Dinaw Mengestu: It was the, from the very beginning, I’m really bad about titles, I’m, I can’t title an essay or anything that I write, but books, book titles seem to emerge really quickly. And All Our Names was from a very early version, where that’s no longer exists, but the characters are talking about all the names that they’ve had during this very brief span because they keep creating new names for themselves. And with every new name, there’s this, sort of possibility of a new identity, of a new future that becomes attached to it. Jo Reed: Right, Isaac is what? The professor, Ali, Langston... Dinaw Mengestu: Langston, the poet, and so, you know, the idea that our identities are not so fixed, that they’re malleable, and suddenly contingent upon the things and the people that we care about. So, there’s a constant evolution of names that happens throughout the novel. Helen talks about how Isaac, at some point once their relationship really cemented itself, he stops calling her Helen and he starts calling her Love. Who you are, it’s not just about one name or one identity but multiple, I think. Jo Reed: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, How To Read The Air, and All Our Names: you had talked about these as a trilogy. Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah. Not in that, like, any of the characters are repeat but that all three books seemed to have worked through a set of ideas that I’ve been curious about. And that all three books, before one novel was done the other one was, sort of, began right away. And all three books, kind of, try to tackle certain ideas, but from different perspectives. You know, what happens to us when we lose our homes? What’s the effect and consequences of political violence on our lives? How do we find and make a new home for ourselves through the people that we love in places that we may not want to be in, or that are rejecting us? And all three books seem to, seem to come at those problems from different perspectives, and they’ve for me have felt like a, sort of, completion of an idea. It’s like you have a set of problems and each book was one way of attacking that problem from a different point of view. Jo Reed: Did you have to do a lot of research for the Uganda part of this. I mean you grew up in Peoria, so you know the Midwest, but how well did you know Uganda before you wrote this book? Dinaw Mengestu: I knew it fairly well because I’d spend time there as a journalist, and whenever I do stories, I tend to try to spend a lot of time investing myself in the history and the places of that I’m going to write about. So I had a pretty good grasp on Uganda’s history, and then I’d spent about a month their writing different stories for, about different things. None of which were in the novel. But that gave me a strong sense of the sort of topography of the place, and the research that I’d done for these articles gave me that historical intimacy. Jo Reed: And was it interesting going from writing journalistic pieces about Uganda to then moving into the realm of fiction? Dinaw Mengestu: No. There’s so many years that separated them. So, you know, the stories I did in Uganda were in 2007. So two, almost three years went by before, echoes of it began to find its way into my novel. So, at that point in time, the memories that were the most important to me, the, sort of, description I know I’m stealing from experiences were obviously the ones that mattered the most because they had retained their space in my mind. Jo Reed: Well, this book is going to retain its space in my mind for quite some time. I felt so invested in those characters. That relationship between Isaac and Isaac, I found that so moving, and it really reminded me of those passionate relationships, those friendships you have when you’re young, and how wonderful they, I mean, there’s nothing like that. Dinaw Mengestu: Thank you. I definitely I felt some profound, like, attachment to those loving, great relationships that I had as a child, as well, that informed those things. And the, the idea that when you’re young and you’re looking for something, those bonds of intimacy are so profound and they are so necessary and so, they become these bits of grace that we need in our lives. Jo Reed: Absolutely. I mean, as you’re trying to figure out who you are, it’s so nice to feel like there’s somebody who else already knows. Dinaw Mengestu: Yeah, exactly. Jo Reed: Dinaw, thank you for talking about this. Dinaw Mengestu: My pleasure. Jo Reed: I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. That was author Dinaw Mengestu, talking about his most recent book, All Our Names, which just came out in paperback. You can another interview with Dinaw talking about the Big Read title, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, at NEABigRead.org You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts.  To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.